


roundabouts and washing lines

by darlingofdots



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Sickfic, let Palamedes take care of Cam for once okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:15:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27402610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingofdots/pseuds/darlingofdots
Summary: Camilla made a noise halfway between a grunt and a moan. The queasiness had passed for the moment, but she still felt like chewed-up wallpaper paste, weak and vaguely blurred around the edges. “Could just be a reaction to those new vitamin additives.”“No way to tell without gathering additional evidence,” the Warden agreed sagely. “You wouldn’t happen to know whether you are currently experiencing elevated temperature, heart palpitations, and a tell-tale skin discolouration on your back and chest?”
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 9
Kudos: 66





	roundabouts and washing lines

**Author's Note:**

> HUGE shoutout to [pipistrelle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle), who kindly did the beta reading! Go check out the [Necromantic Grad School AU](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1956787), it's an absolute masterpiece.
> 
> title from "Pruning Shears" by The Amazing Devil

Camilla knew she was in trouble at ten o’clock that morning; by twelve, she knew she was thoroughly fucked. The fingers gripping her rapier were trembling, her heart was pounding as if she had run thirty laps around the Spire, and there was an ominous fluttering in her stomach. Any one of these individually she could have ignored and pushed through; all three at once were a bad combination, and she was forced to concede that she knew better than to try and continue as though nothing was amiss. Unfortunately, she was cavalier primary to a man who oscillated wildly between being so unaware of his surroundings that a splinter grenade could detonate three metres away and not interrupt his reading, and so uncannily observant that he could point out a new rivet in the Library entrance hall within two minutes of stepping foot in it. Camilla was doomed.

At first, she thought she might still get away with it. When she finally gave in and made her way back to the Warden’s Quarters, Palamedes was bent over a microscope with his shoulder hunched up by his ears exactly the way she kept scolding him for because it gave him headaches, and he barely looked up when she entered. “I finally got Milly to give in and send me a sample of that residue they found down in Level 33,” he said by way of hello. “They’re trying to claim it as dried paint but upon closer inspection, you’ll note that that is completely bonkers.”

This was safe territory. As long as he didn’t beckon her over to see for herself, she would probably be fine. “I’ll take your word for it,” she said, dropping her sword belt on the pathetic excuse for a bed that was the cavalier’s cot.

“Even if the psychometric readings weren’t so obvious, which they are, nobody’s used gel-based paint in five hundred years.” Without lifting his eyes from the ocular lenses, the Warden scribbled something on the sheet of flimsy at his elbow. He wouldn’t be able to read it later, but he would remember having written it, which was basically the same where he was concerned.

Camilla raked a hand through her sweaty hair. She felt disgusting. She probably was disgusting. It was twelve steps from the bed to the sonic, which was about six too many. “Have you told Milly that?” she asked, shifting her weight minutely. If she took her time with it, she might be able to lie down without the mattress rustling.

“Of course I did,” her necromancer huffed. He switched the microscope to maximum magnification. “I also told Milly that it was gross oversight not to pry up the carpets to see if the floor plating was stained.”

Camilla snorted, against her better judgement. It made her head ache. “She won’t have liked that.”

“No, she did not,” the Warden confirmed with great personal satisfaction. He had had his own private vendetta against Milly Shestj since the day she had figured out the combination to a locked filing cabinet four seconds faster than him. Camilla was not sure that Milly knew about the existence of this vendetta, and she was not about to tell her.

Because she was feeling a little off-kilter, Camilla misjudged the distance to the top of the mattress and sat down heavier and much less dignified than she had intended to. The bed creaked, because even the Master Warden’s private quarters were not immune to the passage of time and the furniture was older than both of their ages combined, and a quiet ‘oof’ escaped her before she could grit her teeth around it.

Immediately, his head shot up. One of these days, she thought vaguely, some part of him would actually snap in two like… like a pencil. Or a stray ulna that someone had left lying around for people to tread on. Or maybe a microscope slide. He squinted at her for a moment until he remembered his glasses, which he retrieved from his shirt pocket so he could squint at her through smudged spectacles instead.

“Camilla the Sixth,” he said sternly, like one of her teachers when they caught her experimenting with unsanctioned alternate footwork, “is there something you’d like to tell me?”

“Not particularly,” she said, because there wasn’t. She wouldn’t like to tell him anything.

“I see,” the Warden said, removing his glasses to polish them against his sleeve without breaking eye contact. It was a cheap trick, and one she had been immune to since she was ten. There were many areas of life in which Palamedes Sextus was undoubtedly her superior; she did not have his prodigious memory, or his ability to make people feel at ease with only a few words, or, of course, any necromantic aptitude. In turn, Camilla was the better mathematician, more skilled at organising both his ever-expanding private collection of books and scientific samples, and there were very few bladed weapons she could not wield with at least moderate lethality.

When it came to staring matches, however, all bets were off.

Palamedes won this one for the very simple reason that when presented with the choice between giving in or throwing up over the stack of historical texts on the floor by her feet, she selflessly chose the former. The Warden folded himself down to fit next to her on the bathroom floor while she retched, absolutely furious with herself, and patted her arm until she rocked back to lean against the wall.

“Go away,” she told him. She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see the way he looked at her. She shouldn’t have come back in the first place.

“Tisis syndrome’s been making the rounds, I hear,” he said. “Last I heard it was making the rounds through Experimental Physics.”

Camilla made a noise halfway between a grunt and a moan. The queasiness had passed for the moment, but she still felt like chewed-up wallpaper paste, weak and vaguely blurred around the edges. “Could just be a reaction to those new vitamin additives.”

“No way to tell without gathering additional evidence,” the Warden agreed sagely. “You wouldn’t happen to know whether you are currently experiencing elevated temperature, heart palpitations, and a tell-tale skin discolouration on your back and chest?”

Camilla threw a towel at him. She missed, which was a symptom all on its own. He rose to his feet with more grace than someone of his proportions should possess and passed her a glass of water to wash out her mouth before he vanished briefly to the main room and returned with the big, unwieldy medical bag they had first put together when they were nine. The first thing he did was not, as she had expected, digging out their jury-rigged and possibly contraband heart monitor. With his brows furrowed and his jaw set, he gently pushed her sweaty fringe away from her face and laid his hand on her forehead. His skin was cool against hers; she resisted the urge to lean in to the touch.

“Definitely feverish,” he said. “Cam, you could have told me you weren’t feeling well.”

“I was fine until this morning,” she protested, but she submitted to him undoing the top three buttons of her shirt to confirm that yes, her shoulders and chest were covered in splotches of angry red, and the poor heart monitor beeped indignantly when he hauled her to her feet and the world tilted dangerously off its axis.

“Can you make it to the bed or do I need to test my latest theorems on you?”

She aimed her elbow in the general direction of his ribs, but with his help, she did make it to bed, where she promptly sprawled on her back and closed her eyes. “It’s contagious,” she said.

“It also has a six-day incubation period. If I’m going to catch it, it’s too late anyway.”

“Don’t have to make it worse.”

The Warden gave a little laugh. “Would you rather I take you to the hospital unit so they can feed you synthetic gruel and poke you with pointy instruments every thirty minutes? Thought not.” His hand returned to her forehead and she sighed.

“I’m supposed to protect you.”

“Nobody expects you to defend me from infectious disease, Cam. And it goes both ways, as you well know, even if you pretend you don’t.”

It was usually pointless to argue with him, and especially so when she wasn’t operating at full capacity. He would only dance circles around her arguments and convince her to commit to a full week’s bedrest, which was ridiculous, and by the end of it she would be resigned and he would be smug, and that would almost be worse than being sick in the first place. Which very much did not mean that being sick wasn’t the absolute worst. “You can go back to work,” she muttered.

“It wasn’t important.”

Liar. “What about the fact that nobody has used gel-based paint in five hundred years?”

“It will still be true tomorrow,” he said gently, but he removed his hand and replaced it with the other, which hadn’t been warmed through by her skin yet. “You should get some sleep. I’ll be here.”

Sleep sounded fantastic, actually. Camilla could sleep for a million years. “I didn’t lock the door.”

She could hear the smile in his voice when he said: “That door is the most heavily warded piece of metal on the entire planet.”

Forcing her eyes open, she pushed herself up on her elbows. “I didn’t lock the door,” she repeated, and tried to roll over so she could get up and correct this unforgivable lapse in judgement.

“I’ll do it,” he said, both hands on her shoulders placatingly. He crossed the room to slide home the deadbolts and tap the extra security panel she’d made him install when they had moved in. He had teased her about her paranoia at the time but knowing she had taken all possible precautions helped her sleep at night. “There. All safe.”

Camilla sank back into the pillow. The fact that both her rapier and her double blades were out of reach at the foot of the bed was not ideal, but if she was perfectly honest with herself, she would not have been much use with them anyway. The way things were going, she would be out of commission for at least the next couple of days and the only thing worse than a cavalier without a sword was a cavalier with a sword who was too weak to defend her adept; this had been drilled into her head from the day she had first taken up a blade. “You should tell Master Eoin that you need a replacement.”

“Like hell I do.” The Master Warden of the Sixth dragged a chair to the bed and plonked himself down, propping both of his feet up on the mattress. “As if I would even go anywhere without you.”

“Touching sentiment, Warden, but you have a meeting with the Restoration Committee tomorrow.” Committee meetings were the bane of Camilla’s existence. They took hours, involved furious preparation on the Warden’s part, and afterwards she had to listen to him complain about how nobody ever read the agenda beforehand and how he’d had to answer the same question four separate times.

“The Restoration Committee will keep.” He leaned across her to pull the blankets up over her (still sweaty, still disgusting) torso. “They haven’t made a decision in four months, it’s not going to magically happen tomorrow.”

Camilla groaned and rolled over on her side. Her stomach roiled. “What about dinner with the Archivist?”

He scrunched up his nose. “Right,” he said, “that was tonight. Shit.” With one long finger, he pushed his glasses back up and then dug around in the stacks of flimsy on the nightstand for his tablet. “She’ll keep, too. Go to sleep, Camilla the Sixth. That’s an order. I’ll be here.”

So she went to sleep. She woke up a few times to stagger to the bathroom to throw up, where Palamedes rubbed circles on her lower back and bullied her into sipping glasses of bitter rehydration fluid. Sometime around the evening, the splotches on her shoulders started to itch; she surreptitiously writhed and squirmed until her adept noticed and gently spread a foul-smelling ointment on the bits she couldn’t reach herself, muttering something about cavaliers and notorious thick-headedness. At some point he migrated from the chair to the other side of the bed, flat on his back, and linked their fingers together. Camilla dozed off to the sound of his breathing, even and steady and as familiar to her as her own heartbeat.

The next day was worse; there was nothing left in her to throw up, so she almost pulled a muscle heaving before she managed to choke down some dry crackers and a mug of sweet tea. The minute and a half she spent under the sonic to blast some of the disgusting patina of illness off her skin irritated the rash and tanked her blood pressure so she had to immediately go lie down again; she was intensely aware of the Warden hovering. He eventually migrated back to his desk and microscopes, but she could tell that he kept at least half an eye on her at all times because every time she so much as twitched a muscle, he immediately looked up to check on her. It was sweet, really; and the fact that she would be doing the exact same thing if he were sick meant she couldn’t even complain about it without sounding like the worst kind of hypocrite.

“The chair of the Restoration Committee might actually murder me the next time we cross paths,” the Warden announced cheerfully at some point, dabbing another layer of ointment onto her blotchy collarbones. “And Dulcinea is spending the week at her cousin’s house, which means we should expect her next letter to come with a content advisory warning for foul language.”

“Dulcinea’s cousin is an idiot,” Camilla agreed.

“I’ll tell her you said that,” he said. “It’ll cheer her up.”

By that evening, Camilla was so bored out of her mind that she volunteered to catalogue the latest batch of tissue samples, even though it took her twice as long as it should have to work through the haze of fatigue. The next morning, she convinced the Warden to let her sit on the floor at the foot of the bed and clean her arsenal, relishing in the repetitive movements more than she ordinarily would have. She still felt weak as a kitten, but Camilla had never been the type to sit still for very long and being sick was such a waste of time.

The fever broke after two days and her heart rate evened out after three; on day four, the rash had begun to clear up and Camilla allowed herself to be cautiously optimistic. She had exhausted every way of occupying herself that did not involve the rapid movement of bladed objects or correcting the arrangement of the Warden’s personal book collection (the lack of a real system had been bothering her for months, but he only moved everything back when she attempted to implement one), and she was itching to get this whole miserable business over with so they could both get back to their lives.

Unfortunately, life, sometimes, was a bitch. Just as she felt confident that she could probably win the argument about whether or not it was a good idea for her to put in an hour or two in the gym, her necromancer wobbled ever so slightly when he pushed away from his desk, and grinned ruefully when she narrowed her eyes at him.

“In my defence,” he said, “I’ve been keeping a pretty good grip on it.”

Camilla raised an eyebrow a precisely-calculated fraction of an inch.

The Master Warden sighed. “You weren’t going to tell me you were sick, either,” he pointed out, rubbing at his spectacles with the hem of his shirt. “So really, we’re even.”

“Didn’t know we were keeping score,” Camilla said. “Are you sure you want to go there?”

The memories of all the times he had badly hidden the crust of dried bloodsweat in his nose or stayed up three nights in a row to test a theorem on himself passed over his face like a ghostly spectre. “Perhaps not,” he conceded, swaying a little. “Can I convince you that I really, really need to finish this board review?”

“Nope,” Camilla said, trying not to sound smug. Now that she’d had a good look at him, he really did look as though he was keeping a grip on it, which wasn’t ideal because it meant he was constantly expanding extra thanergy, but at least he wasn’t about to keel over on her. “It’ll only get worse if you try to avoid it,” she pointed out.

“I know,” he groaned, dropping back into the chair like a puppet with its strings cut. He scrubbed a hand over his face, under his glasses. “It’s such a bother. I don’t have time to be ill.”

“Should have thought about that before you insisted on sticking around.” She didn’t mean that, and he knew it. Together, they managed to extract him from his desk chair and across the room where Camilla poured him into bed, to sink tragically into the pillows with his head tipped back against the headboard like the long-suffering protagonist of a period romance novel. He was always so dramatic when he was sick. Accepting her fate, Camilla curled up next to her necromancer on top of the covers, cradled one of his narrow wrists between her hands so she could feel his pulse, and went back to sleep.


End file.
